Agreed. The other serious problem with OpenDoc, from a business standpoint, is that it could have alienated big software vendors such as Microsoft and Adobe fr

Agreed. The other serious problem with OpenDoc, from a business standpoint, is that it could have alienated big software vendors such as Microsoft and Adobe from Mac OS at a time when Apple needed Microsoft's and Adobe's commitment to providing Mac versions of Office and Photoshop/Illustrator. Indeed, they even balked at porting their applications to the OpenStep/Yellow Box/Cocoa API, which forced Apple to change its Rhapsody strategy and announce Carbon in 1998. But OpenDoc's component-based software model would have been an even greater disruption: Microsoft and Adobe might have balked at supporting a platform that would make it easier for upstarts to compete by selling components. There's a nice Hacker News comment that is a repost of another comment that describes why OpenDoc didn't fit with Apple's business model and how the Linux desktop missed a big opportunity by not pursuing an OpenDoc-style approach to the Linux desktop in the mid-1990s when KDE was in its infancy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573373